KIGONDU REVEALED A RANGE OF ROLES IN ONE SHOW

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (wrote October 20^th, 2022)

Theatre is not football where you have a big musical bash at half-time or during intermission.

So, to see the double-dosage of ‘curtain raisers’ perform not just before Martin Kigondu’s Supernova opened at Ukumbi Mdogo on Mashujaa Day, but again, during the play’s intermission was unacceptable.

The group may have been good musicians, but their effort to ‘steal the show’ by singing love songs before Act 2 began virtually killed the suspense that Martin had built at the end of act one when the last words we heard were that his baby girl was dead.

Kigondu does an awesome thing in Supernova. By his performances of multiple characters all during one solo show, he convinces that he must be one (if not the) finest character actors in Kenya.

He starts his show as an upbeat radio broadcaster, a talk-show man like the ones who entertain us during our early morning matatu rides to town. The whole show is his character’s conversation with us, his audience. But through that conversation, he travels through time. It’s mostly to the recent (and often painful) past, but he always brings us back to the present.

In the present, he’s initially getting dressed, drinking coffee, and telling us about how delighted he is with his program hours getting extended, and now getting a radio show of his own. All this is engaging as he only drops hints that he’s got problems at home.

He never admits that he might be the source of his wife’s problem. For while she went through her pregnancy, he was always away working. He was never there to support her or make her feel good about having their baby.

In any case, he gives us a magnetic performance. He also reveals how well he can take on two-or-three-characters’ roles at once. He does that, describing a fight he had with Eve, his wife, mediated by Eve’s mother Janet. It doesn’t end well; but now we know Kigondu’s super-charged with metamorphic powers.

The one character that confirms the actor’s skillful ability to get into another person’s skin is when he comes out as Frank’s father. We’ve already heard from the son that Dad is a widower who recently had a minor stroke. But he’s mostly recovered and the remaining aches and pains have been assuaged by the medical marijuana he’s been taking ever since his hired help, Njage, introduced him to it.

Kigondu’s disappearance into the dad’s character is practically complete. From the way he walks and talks to the way he moves his lower lip, you have to admire this old man. If you hadn’t been told the man was the same radio broadcaster, we met in act one, you wouldn’t see Kigondu anywhere in the character of the dad.

It's the dad that helps us appreciate how much pain his son is feeling with the demise of his daughter and departure of his wife. Father and son both attended the funeral service for the baby, but it’s the dad who takes note that Frank walked out in the middle of the service.

We also attended the service when Kigondu opened in act two, playing the insensitive priest who made no mention of the baby’s paternity. Now is when we come to realize this seemingly mind-mannered radio guy has been traumatized by his baby’s death, especially when no one in Eve’s family will tell him what went wrong. Why and how did the baby die?

His inability to get answers leads to Frank exploding with rage leading to his ramming down the door to eve’s bedroom so he can have a heart-to-heart with his wife. But she wants no such thing. She’s finished with the guy for whatever reason, she will not tell.

By the time he gets back to the humble flat that he’s shifting from, Frank is able to tell us how his daughter’s death was like a supernova, an astronomical term referring to the death of a star resulting in a black hole.

For Frank, his daughter was his star and his grief at her demise was taking him to dark hole kind of space.

It’s on that tragic note of despair that Kigondu leaves his audience. I’m not sure why he ended the play with him writhing in anguish on the floor in tears except that we see that men can cry and be just as sensitive as any woman.

Kigondu scripted, directed, and starred in his one-man show. He pulled it off rather well.